Welcome to Press Select August 21 2013

Today, we’re incredibly excited to introduce Press Select to the world—an independent publisher of original and unique books about videogames. We’ll be publishing and supporting quality, long-form writing about games from a diverse range of critics, and hopefully building a new format for the way people talk about games.

Videogames are a serious creative form and a significant part of contemporary popular culture, and they deserve and demand serious critical attention. We believe that there’s a lot of people out there who want to see writing about videogames develop, and that there’s a real opportunity for close, critical writing about games to be pushed into longer, more challenging, and creative directions.

With Press Select, we want to contribute to the craft of videogame criticism. We’ll do it like this:

We’ll publish exciting work by exciting people. We’ll get the best videogame critics in the business to write about the best videogames. We’ll put great writers to work on their dream projects. We’ll work with them to turn out the most polished and professional book possible, collaborating with editors, designers, and illustrators along the way.

We’ll financially support our authors. From the moment of publication, 50% of every sale will go directly to the author. Once publication-related costs are covered, the majority of every sale will go straight to the author for all future sales. Press Select’s primary goal is to support the craft and maturation of videogame criticism, and that means supporting the people that write it.

We’re completely DRM-free. We believe that our audience will trust and want to support our writers, and that means that we want to trust and support our readers. That means Press Select’s books will be released digitally, DRM-free, with the one transaction purchasing a pdf, epub, and mobi versions of the book.

But who are we? Press Select is co-founded by Australians Dan Golding and Brendan Keogh—both active members of the online game criticism community and videogame critics in their own right.

Dan has written about the art and culture of videogames for a variety of game-centric and mainstream publications, including ABC Arts, The Guardian, Meanjin, Hyper Magazine, Kill Your Darlings, and Crikey. In 2012, he won the award for Best Gaming Journalist at the Microsoft IT Journalism Awards.

Brendan has worked as a videogame journalist and critic for outlets including Edge, Hyper, Ars Technica, Polygon, Unwinnable, Kill Screen, and The New Statesman. In late 2012, in cooperation with Stolen Projects, Brendan also wrote and published one of the first ever pieces of long-form videogame criticism focused on the analysis of a single game: Killing is Harmless: A Critical Analysis of Spec Ops: The Line. As much an experiment in what long-form videogame criticism might look like as an analysis of Spec Ops: The Line, the book garnered much attention, and has gone on to sell in excess of 6000 copies.

In many ways, Press Select is a continuation of the experiment that Killing is Harmless started. Killing is Harmless showed just one of the many possible ways forward for long-form videogame criticism. It is our hope that by creating a platform for other writers to approach the games they admire, we will discover a vast range of new ways to write about videogames, to understand and appreciate their place in and as part of contemporary culture.

We plan to launch our first book in early 2014, and we have several authors lined up to release books throughout the year. Our authors include well-known and respected game journalists, critics, bloggers, and developers, and we’re incredibly excited to be working with them.

Jenn Frank, game critic, formerly of EGM and 1UP, Editorial Director at Unwinnable, and voice of Super Hexagon

We are incredibly excited about each of these authors (along with the authors we are not quite ready to announce) and the books they are writing.

We will have plenty more announcements in the coming months as we get closer to launching our first books. But for now, we just wanted to let you all know that we exist. To keep up-to-date with the project, be sure to subscribe to our mailing list, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. We promise we will be using all of them sparingly and won’t spam you! And if you’re looking to get in touch with us, send us an email at editors@pressselectpublishing.com. We’re very excited about this project and the writing that is going to come out of it. We hope you’ll come along for the ride.